A wide variety of applications running on networked environments, such as the Internet or World Wide Web (WWW), allow users to access to ever-increasing amounts of information. For example, search engines provide a powerful tool for locating content in documents in a large database of documents, such as the documents on the Internet and/or the documents stored on the computers of an Intranet. These applications, however, often depend on a user action or request. For example, a user performs a search using one or more search queries, consisting of one or more words, terms, keywords and/or phrases, henceforth called terms, that are submitted by a user. Many users would like to have information or content that is of interest to them automatically provided to them, with little or no effort on their part. Such an approach to distributing information is sometimes called a “push” method of distributing information, as opposed to information retrieved in response to explicit user commands or queries, which is sometimes referred to as a “pull” or “on demand” method of distributing information.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved approach to providing content to users.